Organizational culture shaping. Structural changes hardly solve behavioural problems. It’s a trap.

Structural answers to organizational problems are very unlikely to succeed.

Division A people don’t collaborate with Division B people, so we create a new division C (which is A+B) and put everybody under the same roof. You will collaborate now! Or else! But A people still don’t talk to B people. We have given a structural answer (a new division) to a behavioural problem – lack of collaboration. Bad idea.

Reorganizing is often a management need, not an organizational need. It’s also a default management activity, highly visible, a sign that management ‘is doing something about it’.

After a crisis of some sort it is quite common to ‘learn from it’ and ‘solve for the future’ by ‘reviewing’ or changing the structure. It is often unclear whether ‘the structure’ had anything to do with the crisis or the problem in the first place.

But if leadership has run out of other ideas, a reorganization is always handy and a possibility. Common issues of trust, communications, collaboration, accountability, etc, are hardly solvable by structural responses. People will carry those issues with them to their new homes. Yet, this is well known but we keep doing it.

This ‘default answer’ is still very prominent in the organization.

Before ‘reorganizing’ to solve a problem, a proper analysis of the communication flow and knowledge flow should take place. We have a tool for this, called 3CXcan, which could reveal for example that a particular reorganization is not needed because the communication flow is adequate. However, perhaps, there are other cases where trust is poor, or knowledge transfer is blocked, and these are the real issues to tackle. It’s only after running 3CXcan that the logic of reshuffling homes can be tested.

In 2020 there is no room for automatic pilot ‘we will reorganize you’ as a solution to a behavioural problem. It’s lazy management.

A tool like 3CXcan can also give you a real sense of the magnitude of the problem. Entire divisional reorganizations have taken place because a couple of key individuals are the problem, not the entire system. How many times have I challenged: do you mean that if you removed John and Mary things would be very different? And how many times it has been acknowledged that in reality this was the case, it all came down to very particular individuals.

Without a handle on the behavioural DNA of the company and the dynamics of flow (influence, knowledge transfer, informal communication, formal communication) a reorganization is truly blind, an act of alfa-male-female reaction, a perhaps popular and populist reaction, but unlikely a solution.

It would be the difference between machine gun approach and keyhole surgery.

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3CXcan provides a diagnosis of your formal and informal connections. 

3CXcan uses organizational network science software called Cfinder Algorithm, a tool for network cluster (community) detection, to give you a profound understanding of your internal networks. With this data you can build effective solutions for your organizational challenges. It is an online diagnostic tool which: 

? Provides a picture: of the formal and informal organization and how effectively both operate.

? Reveals: organizational connections from strong to weak, to ineffective and broken connection.

? Gains insight: on the specific solutions and interventions required.

? Identifies: the individuals that will leverage change more effectively (ie champions).

Find out how this online process can help your business.

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project, an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change?, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability. 

Subscribe to his Daily Thoughts blog.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management and an international speaker, he can be reached at: The Chalfont Project.